Expand Katipunan to Ateneo campus.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Neal H. Cruz

THE METRO Manila Development Authority will go ahead with the cutting of trees on Katipunan Avenue to ease the traffic congestion in front of Miriam and Ateneo. The MMDA wants to remove the islands separating the service roads from the main road and thus widen the avenue and allow it to carry more vehicles. But growing on those islands are the trees, so they will have to go, said the MMDA.

Ateneo and Miriam management, students, residents of the area and environmental groups are opposing the planned tree-cutting, but MMDA Chair Bayani Fernando sees no other alternative to ease the traffic congestion. There have been many suggestions, such as a drop-and-ride plan, a four-day school week, a carless day for Ateneo and Miriam students, and a bridge between the two schools. Some have been suggested by the MMDA but the opposers rejected them all. Others have been suggested by the universities but the MMDA dismissed them as impractical. So, many trees that have struggled to survive for many years on Katipunan would be massacred.

Strangely, despite the many brains in those meetings, nobody has thought to propose the most obvious, simplest, easiest and most logical way to widen Katipunan. That is to expropriate a narrow strip, enough for two lanes, of the Ateneo and Miriam campuses. In the first place, the two universities and their students would be the principal beneficiaries of the road widening. And the narrow strip in question is nothing but empty space. And they would be amply paid for it, too. The University of the Philippines is giving up its Integrated High School campus for the widening of Katipunan, why can't Ateneo and Miriam give up a tiny strip of their huge campuses for everybody's good?

In helping write and pass the Lina Law, some Ateneo priests said property owners should sacrifice their properties for the sake of the squatters. But at the same time, they refuse to allow displaced squatters to pitch their shanties even if only temporarily on the huge and largely empty campus. It was like telling the squatters, for whom their hearts bleed, it's all right for you to take over other people's properties, but not ours.

In the widening of Katipunan, Ateneo has the same policy: Everybody should make sacrifices, but not us.